Manchester United and City set for epic battle for EPL supremacy

RED or blue, United or City — with the best coaches and the biggest budgets, it could be argued Manchester is the centre of the football universe right now.

AS ESTATE agents like to tell you, it doesn’t take much to revitalise a neighbourhood — sometimes a lick of paint and some cosmopolitan new arrivals is enough.

So it’s no wonder that Manchester feels at arguably its most exciting point, and on the edge of an era, since Oasis and their ilk created the Mancunian music scene 20 years ago.

From Old Trafford, via the city centre and out to Etihad Stadium, both United and City have “under new management” signs hung out, with the clubs’ loyal clientele wondering just what will be served up.

Rarely do football fans get the perfect storm of two hugely successful and equally charismatic coaches taking over two sides of a city at the same moment in time, their contrasting personalities destined to inform how their two teams do battle.

Mourinho vs. Guardiola is one of the season’s more interesting battles.

It’s a bit trite to bill Pep Guardiola versus Jose Mourinho as good against evil, although City fans wouldn’t demur. But it is a fascinating contrast to watch Guardiola’s pursuit of perfect football collide with Mourinho’s creed where success is bettered only by more success, and never mind the route to that end.

Mourinho will do whatever it takes to win, the philosophy that meant United tried David Moyes and Louis van Gaal as successors to Sir Alex Ferguson before they were almost forced to turn to the self-styled Special One.

The man himself believes pragmatism is a hugely unfair label — after all, in two of his three years at Real Madrid, Mourinho’s side outscored Guardiola’s Barcelona. Yet there is an efficiency to his teams that is fundamentally at odds with the gung-ho nature of the United teams that Sir Alex Ferguson created.

Record signing Paul Pogba shows Mourinho’s ability to draw the best talent.

In Mourinho’s favour, most United fans will view anything as an improvement on the dour football that van Gaal imposed, and which in the end cost him the job despite winning last year’s FA Cup.

But as Ryan Giggs has already warned, those same fans are “greedy” and want titles delivered with style. Of Mourinho’s two signings, one was easy in the sense of being a free transfer of a player who already likes working with his coach at Inter Milan.

But the fact that the other big splash was spending a world-record sum on an industrious midfielder plays into the caricature of Mourinho’s football that some critiques portray.

The one guarantee, in so far as such a word exists in football, is that he will be successful, through sheer force of personality. If and when the Mourinho era at Old Trafford implodes as his reigns at every other club have done so spectacularly, is a question for many days’ hence at a club desperate for immediate title gratification.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic has brought the swagger back to United.

At City, the opposite conundrum is in place — Guardiola similarly offers a bank guarantee of bravado football, played at pace and with an almost obsessional focus on purity of passing, but the question mark is if and how quickly he can make that style a winning one in the hurly burly of the EPL.

Again, in one signing you can sum up the coach — Guardiola bringing in Claudio Bravo from Barcelona as a goalkeeper with a fantastic passing range, to replace Joe Hart and play out from the back.

Of course Bravo is by no means his only acquisition, but in comparison to United, City already had forwards with the calibre of David Silva and Sergio Aguero, to which the Spaniard Nolito has been added.

Guardiola’s treatment of City product Joe Hart has drawn criticism.

If anything, the fact both City and United finished on 66 points last season reflects a falling-away by the sky-blue half of Manchester, and Guardiola’s brief is to re-energise a squad that won the title only two years ago but had apparently eased off under Manuel Pellegrini.

It’s hard to describe Guardiola as anything other than driven, but there is possibly just a scintilla of extra motivation in the fact that it is Mourinho who faces him across his new home city.

The enmity between the two at Real Madrid and Barcelona was genuine, albeit with a faintly pantomime quality from Mourinho as so often in his public comments.

Guardiola’s City may take some time to take shape.

Guardiola was angered by the physicality with which Madrid players tackled his squad when the two sides played a run of epic games within a few weeks of 2011. Two years later they again traded barbs when Guardiola’s Bayern Munich faced Mourinho’s Chelsea in the European Super Cup.

And now they have a new theatre to continue the dispute, separated by the small expanse of Manchester’s city centre. For those wearing red and light blue across the city, it will be a huge part of which side claims the more success. For those of us watching from the neutral seats, it promises a season’s worth of entertainment.

Originally published as Manchester United and City set for epic battle for EPL supremacy